Question For People Who Know About Gha

[Luke.]

ok so since I’ve been in this hobby, only once have I had a few patches on my rock work , I manually removed it and it’s never been back , BUT almost always like 95% of the time I get it in high flow areas I have 3 spots and 1 isn’t nearly as bad as the other 2

So I have a ground prob that dangles near the out out of my hob skimmer and it’s the number 1 spot the collects the GHA , my number 2 spot is my rw8 powerhead , and the 3rd is the return of my canister filter ,

I use phos guard in a sock bag inside my canister , I can never tell if it really works or not been using this for about a year.

Any ideas ?

I do buy my water from crystal clear water and use prime , tank seems fine just wondering if I’m doing something wrong here .

 

[Salty Cracker]

Phos guard only works so long before it starts leeching back into the water column (the only people that say it doesn't are the ones selling that shit).

Switch to phosban and replace every 3 weeks (set a schedule alarm on your phone). High light, high flow and phosphate are the 3 ingredients of HA (that's why people build algae scrubbers). I didn't have any luck with phosphate scrubbers, although I grew some mega nice crops. The only thing that kept HA out indefinitely was ferric oxide (phosguard is a nice wet commercial version of it).

Seachem is aluminum oxide based. So after a ton of people had trouble with it, seachem made some press release that denied all claims, and a lot of people believed it, well except for chemists. There was a big thread on some german salt forum a long while back, and had some famous german chemist that went through everything (was horrible to read because it was all in german and I used bablefish at the time to translate), and they were adamant that ferric oxide would be the winner in the 'oxide' battles, but lo and behold, the white shit is still around. I look at it this way: aluminum oxide works faster than ferric oxide, but does not retain phosphate or silicates for long if not removed in good time from the tank. Ferric oxide sorks slower, but holds phosphate until it is chemically released from the media. Much better option in my (poorly translated) opinion. Can't argue with germans.

 

[Luke.]

@Salty Cracker sounds good man , I appreciate the comment and will switch it up shortly , I have about 1 more use out of the phosguard , again keep in mind I don’t run a reactor and I do not have a sump ,

Might be a dumb question but this product you are talking about if fine with active carbon right ?​

 

[Salty Cracker]

I run two reactors in series myself, first with carbon, second with GFO, and then a fine mesh sock on the end to catch any particles that escape, both seem to run just fine together. I don't change the carbon very often though, just the gfo (when I didn't follow a schedule with gfo I started to think "the stuff doesn't work). Schedule/changing is the key. At one point I had it down to .03 PPB on the hanna phosphorous reader. I'm way up from that now, I run the tank a bit more dirty than I used to

 

[msobon]

A hungry Lawnmower Blenny should solve your optics problem, not so much water problem

 

[Luke.]

A hungry Lawnmower Blenny should solve your optics problem, not so much water problem

Haha yes I know , I did have one years ago and man he would poop as fast as he ate xD